Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday June 18, 2014 @05:22PM
from the pi-is-exactly-3 dept.

sandbagger sends this news from io9:
In what's being heralded as a secular triumph, the U.K. government has banned the teaching of creationism as science in all existing and future academies and free schools. The new clauses, which arrived with very little fanfare last week, state that the "requirement for every academy and free school to provide a broad and balanced curriculum in any case prevents the teaching of creationism as evidence based theory in any academy or free school." So, if an academy or free school teaches creationism as scientifically valid, it's breaking the funding agreement to provide a "broad and balanced curriculum." ... In addition to the new clauses, the UK government clarified the meaning of creationism, reminding everyone that it's a minority view even within the Church of England and the Catholic Church.

Don't congratulate yourself too hard. This was only ever a problem in free schools*; teaching creationism in state schools was never even considered. It's worth pointing out that the education system in the UK is very different from that in the US: for one thing, local residents and local government have no say in the curricula.

*These are a recent invention here, ones where parents and the public at large have a much bigger say in how the school is run. They can have faith-based schooling so long as the Department for Education is satisfied that they meet a bare minimum standard of the basics.

Don't congratulate yourself too hard. This was only ever a problem in free schools*; teaching creationism in state schools was never even considered. It's worth pointing out that the education system in the UK is very different from that in the US: for one thing, local residents and local government have no say in the curricula.

Its also worth noting that unlike the US, religion isn't banned from schools, in fact scripture classes were opt out (last time I checked).

No religion in schools was one of the few things I envied about the US school system, here in Oz most private schools are Catholic or other Christian denomination.

But this move does not prevent the teaching of creationism in British schools, it only prevents it from being presented as an scientific theory. It can be taught in other classes that aren't classed as a science (like literature or art). However Creationism isn't really big in Britain where people tend to be more grounded in reality.

"Its also worth noting that unlike the US, religion isn't banned from schools"

The implications of that in the US vary between schools. While it's true that the school isn't permitted to officially endorse or promote any religion, there is often a great deal of popular pressure for them to do so which lets them do so in a more informal manner and sometimes just outright flout the law.

Note that most US schools start the day by encouraging students to pledge their allegiance to God and country. This is legal,

No religion in schools was one of the few things I envied about the US school system

Really? Whether or not you believe in a religion it is worthwhile knowing what the basic beliefs of the major world religions are because chances are you are likely to have to interact with people who do believe in them. Besides, they do teach religion in US schools: they just cover it in their science classes!;-)

Ahh, you seem to be under the impression that we were taught what religion was, rather than preached at for an hour a week.

We learned nothing about Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Islam, Confucianism or Hinduism, let alone smaller religions. All we were taught was Christianity, straight from a preacher (a nun or priest) quoting the bible. To be fair, it was Anglican rather than Baptist, so less sin and hell-fire and more Jesus is great.
The Jewish kid had to get his parents to write a letter stating that he was not a Christian and did not want to participate. The preaching was mandatory for everyone else. It was entirely possible for a student to go through 12 years of schooling without learning a thing about another language.

Because there is great public support for teaching the bible in some states, it's easy for schools to violate the constitution and get away with it simply because no official dares to take action against them and face a career-killing backlash. In your case, the school probably just declared it a 'bible as literature' course and denied it was in any way religious. A paper-thin excuse, but with sufficient public support that is all it needs.

yep, but that was a few hundred years ago when the most devout christians of britain were told they couldn't practice discrimination against others so they went to US to set up the freedom to discriminate against others

Many US Christians seem extremely bizarre over here. They sound very right wing, seem to have forgotten about the New Testament, xenophobic and some even carry guns.
Yes it is a doctrine foreign to us.

No one is stopping anyone from teaching anything.The Government is just not funding the teaching of creationism as evidence based theory in state funded schools. If you want to teach your children creationism, go for it. No one can legally stop you.

"[A]ny doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution."

Basically, if you claim that anything other than simple biology was at work in creating animals, then you lose your funding (and possibly right to call yourselves a school).

You can claim that God made biology possible by creating a universe in which biology could make them exist, but you can't claim that God "created" animals at all.

You can claim that God made biology possible by creating a universe in which biology could make them exist, but you can't claim that God "created" animals at all.

This seems like a pretty dumb rule. If I claim human beings created computers, am I wrong because it turns out that computers are actually directly created by industrial machines?

By saying you think God created the universe you are still saying that God created all life (and probably that he knew he was creating life), but that evolution is the mechanism by which life was created (i.e. evolution can still be true even if God created the animals).

AFAICT, it looks like you can't use God scientific evidence of anything. This makes sense because the existence of a creator cannot be empirically determined (can you think of a repeatable experiment that would prove or disprove that there is a creator?). That is unless the creator revealed himself to us, at which point, the study of the creator would be a science.

can you think of a repeatable experiment that would prove or disprove that there is a creator?

I suppose this would be similar to thinking of an experiment that would prove or disprove that some same particular species of spider lives in the rainforest.

The experiment is "look for the spider", and if you find it, then it exists, and if you don't, then you don't really know, but it makes sense to tentatively assume the null hypothesis (that it doesn't exist).

In this sense, the God hypothesis is not unfalsifiable in principle, just in practice. It's important to note this difference between falsifiability in principle and practice. The Higgs boson hypothesis was falsifiable by an experiment involving the LHC. The LHC didn't exist in the 18th century so if the Higgs boson were proposed in the 18th century would not have been practically falsifiable, but it was still falsifiable in principle (i.e. a machine like the LHC could one day, maybe hundreds of years in the future, be constructed).

There is a good argument to be made that the existence of God is also not falsifiable in principle. You could have a super powerful alien capable of destroying entire worlds and causing us to hallucinate in anyway it desires. You could never really trust that an entity claiming to be the creator of the whole universe was telling the truth. Any beings significantly more technologically advanced than us would be practically indistinguishable from a God.

Also, even if there were really a God that created our universe, this God could not know for sure that he was really God in the sense that he couldn't know that there was nothing greater than himself (for the same way that we atheists can't know that there is nothing greater than us).

But if it turns out that God's existence is unfalsifiable in principle, then this means that even God presenting himself to us, is still not sufficient proof for his existence, because we don't even have a way to verify that a being is really God (i.e. that there is nothing greater) and not just some extremely powerful being.

If a powerful being showed us a video of himself creating the universe, we can probably assume he is powerful enough to fabricate a video. Obviously the proof is probably not going to be a conventional video, but whatever form the proof takes, it doesn't matter. We can assume that a sufficiently powerful being could convince us of anything, regardless of whether it's true or false.

can you think of a repeatable experiment that would prove or disprove that there is a creator?

Can you think of a repeatable experiment that would prove or disprove that there are magical unicorns?

See, it's not up to science to prove some imaginary thing you or anyone else comes up with. It's your idea, so you prove it. If you can do that, science will suddenly become interested. But, seeing as how the "God" superstition has exactly as much fact backing it up as the magical unicorn idea, that is to say, none whatsoever, the balls in your court. Not in science's.

Here's the metric: reproducible, consensually experiential, testable. None of "I had an idea", " I read it in an old book" or "someone swore to me it was true" equals "it's Science!"

Sorry you lost your wife and son. I think experiences such as yours shows the background and reason why humans had to invent gods. Originally those gods were in the Sun, or Rocks or Trees or anything else mystical, and they gave comfort to humans. Which is fine, but let's not confuse that comfort with something that actually exists.

I too am sorry for your pain. It means nothing to reality, though. Reality is reality, it doesn't care about your feelings or mine, your wishes or mine, your faith or mine.... it is reality. In reality, there is no evidence, and never has been any evidence, that God exists... none, not a single shred, ever in the history of the human species. Teaching that there is to a bunch of impressionable children, should be considered a vile form of abuse.

Yes, please share this actual scientific evidence of God's existence. I've heard so many devoutly religious people spout all sorts of complete bullshit on the topic, and not understand that if there ever had been any evidence, God's existence wouldn't be a matter of faith, but of science.... but there is none, regardless of what made up fantasy bullshit you pull out of your ass. More likely is the simple probability that you do not understand what the word "evidence" means, and you've been brainwashed by

When you get right down to it the existence of a Creator and an Afterlife are completely independent concepts - either could exist without the other, nor does the existence of one imply the existence of the other.

As it happens I believe in neither (agnostic, not atheist) and have come to regard the questions as largely uninteresting, instead adopting something of a Zen Taoist "faith". Which is really no faith at all, but simply an alternate and more personable way of looking at the simple fact that the dist

I suppose this would be similar to thinking of an experiment that would prove or disprove that some same particular species of spider lives in the rainforest.

The experiment is "look for the spider", and if you find it, then it exists, and if you don't, then you don't really know, but it makes sense to tentatively assume the null hypothesis (that it doesn't exist).

Also, to be more complete, when you've searched the whole forest, several times over, and had a hundred cases of believers saying "there, that's the spider!" and then you caught it and it turned out to be... not the spider, then you can a) put more confidence on the null hypothesis and b) ignore the next time the believers say "but this time, over there, certainly!".

There is a good argument to be made that the existence of God is also not falsifiable in principle. You could have a super powerful alien capable of destroying entire worlds and causing us to hallucinate in anyway it desires. You could never really trust that an entity claiming to be the creator of the whole universe was telling the truth. Any beings significantly more technologically advanced than us would be practically indistinguishable from a God.

There are two excellent arguments that disprove creator-of-the-universe type gods quite thoroughly. The first is by extrapolation, like above:

Basically, if you claim that anything other than simple biology was at work in creating animals, then you lose your funding (and possibly right to call yourselves a school).

No, only if you make it those claims (because they violate the scientific method) in a class that you label as "science." Nothing is preventing a school from teaching it in a class labeled as "theology." The point is to be clear that one idea is based on evidence backed up using the scientific method ("science"), while the other is based on belief without evidence and/or despite evidence to the contrary ("faith" or "theology"), or with supposed evidence that cannot be validated using the scientific method (pseudoscience).

Actually, if I read the summery correct and it is actually representative of the article and life in reality, by creationism they mean scientific support of creation either all animals created at once or by God creating them.

Or in other words, it doesn't ban the teaching, just the teaching that it is " as evidence based theory". You could likely teach it as a "this is what people used to believe until evidence showed this" and get buy with it.

Yes, you could teach it in a balanced way by looking at several creation myths from various religions, include it in a discussion of the enlightenment and maybe more people will leave HS understanding that religion and science split because blind faith and reason are fundamentally incompatible.

Yes, you could teach it in a balanced way by looking at several creation myths from various religions, include it in a discussion of the enlightenment and maybe more people will leave HS understanding that religion and science split because blind faith and reason are fundamentally incompatible.

Yep, you can look at the various creation myths, spot the similarities (throw in Pastafarianism for shits and giggles), compare these myths to science and get students to spot the flaws.... The fundies would shit a brick.

The big problem behind creationism as science is that you're not meant to think critically about it. You're not meant to question it. Its entirely faith based. You have to accept, with no evidence that god exists before any of the rest of it makes sense.

You're dealing with Anglicans here. They tend not to interpret the bible all that literally. If you were to say to one that the Universe was created in an instant over ten billion years ago they'd be much more likely to say "well, duh" than to start ranting about how it was hashed out over a week only 6000 years ago.

And it's been that way for a while. The Archbishop of Canterbury, more-or-less the leader of the Anglican Communion, announced his enthusiastic acceptance of the basic tenants of the theory of evolution...in 1884.

Britain Rules Teaching Children Known Falsehoods In Science Class For Religious Reasons Now Deemed Inappropriate

Good. Honestly, though, this isn't a huge deal for Britain. Almost every developed country has this policy either formally or de-facto.

If this came out of the US, though, holy balls it would be big. The US seems to be the only country where a sizable body of Christians are allowed to lie for Jesus to impressionable children, or worse, genuinely believe creationist excrement and are still permitted to use their authority to teach it to others.

If education is done right, with teachers and schools that care to really develops a childs mind, then the kids learn the difference between science and religion, what it means for a scientific theory to be credible and widely held, how to evaluate scientific evidence, and what questions that religion attempts to answer that science at least, at this point, can not. They also can go through all the current scientific evidence for and against evolution, creationism, and other theories. Kids learn how to id

Creationism is, of course, utter nonsense. But what is currently the mandatory teaching of evolution and banning of creationism may well turn into the mandatory teaching of creationism in the future; or the mandatory teaching of racism, Marxism and other harmful ideologies that used to pretend to have a rational, scientific basis.

School curricula should be primarily determined at the local level, by parents. They shouldn't be determined by central governments and majority vote.

This came out of a row in Britain over an investigation into schools in Birmingham. Unlike the US situation, what brought this about was a charge that Muslims were trying to take over schools in Birmingham and alter the lessons to support Islamic Ideals. The term you can search on to find this is Trojan Horse Investigation, along with Birmingham.

England != UK. This is the Dept of Education for England not Scotland, or Wales, or Northern Ireland - all of which are UK yet, strangely, they are not England.

You're lucky the Americans can find the UK on a map, asking them to differentiate between the countries that make up the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland (not for long) and Northern Ireland is asking a lot.

Sure. And that's fine. You can have religious questions in philosophy class, alongside Greek myths, African tribal legends, etc. If a student chooses to believe Zeus had sex with a swan and had a daughter that's okay, as long as it's not presented to the students by the faculty as plausible.

It's only when the school is presenting any religiously influenced doctrine as true when the scientific consensus disagrees that we have problems.

Actually, the best we've got is the scientific method, which democratizes knowledge by insisting that instead of simply *asserting* something, authorities must present a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis.

Experts may be necessary to construct these hypotheses, or even collect the data necessary to test them, but non-experts would do well to insist on the scientific method rather than a vote of a group of people in lab coats.

Feynman said it best, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of expert

Riddle me this , Batman."by looking for the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement."well, here are 6.1) Visible Light strikes the earth. Falsifiable and tested.2) When Visible light strike something, IR is generated. Falsifiable and tested.3) CO2 is invisible to visible light. Falsifiable and tested.4) CO2 absorbs energy from IR. Falsifiable and tested.5) The amount of CO2 in the air exceeds what can be absorbed.Falsifiable and tested.6) The Amount of CO2 in the air is rising due to human

Not really - old, new, or entirely unrelated to Christianity - if you claim that the creation of life by a supernatural being is position backed by scientific evidence, you are either misinformed or outright lying. At best you can insert a "God of the Gaps", but even that, by definition, has no supporting scientific evidence.

Now a way must be found to prevent parents from poisoning the young minds with things the vast majority of the scientific community considers incorrect.

That's better, just a minor correction.

There's no reason to outlaw parents from teaching their children mythology as if it were commonly accepted fact, just like they did not outlaw schools from doing so. The school would just lose its government funding. I'm not sure if there would be a similar kind of incentive to get parents to also refrain from spoutin

Also, I consulted every site on the Internet and a consortium of literature professors, and they told me you don't know what "hyperbole" means. You may have been looking for "satire".

The funny thing about that is that I looked up the definition of hyperbole less than 30 minutes before I wrote that because I didn't want to use it incorrectly somewhere else. Maybe it was just on my mind. I'm pretty sure that's irony.

:) That is funny. The reason I was calling your take on Mi's post "creepy" is because I think the notion of an ordained state-run party of scientists and their opinions is scary, even if they are large enough to make up a "vast majority". It sounds like some kind of whitecoat Spanish Inquisition.

Finally, someone with the strength and will to power to come out and say what must be done in order to bring about our glorious new age of perfect government-approved science and PROGRESS! Are we holding any rallies soon? Where can we sign up? Also, I have an incinerator-making company in need of construction contracts, and some remote campsite locations for sale. Who's with us?

Now I know someone will say but those are slanted and biased sites. Yes they are and they are somewhat polar opposite in their slants so it should mean the story is true. However, for the crazy still needing more, it appears the local governments don't want left out of the fun filled craze.http://ww [dailymail.co.uk]

Nope. You can find plenty of examples by doing your own research, I'm not doing it for you. It won't take long, a simple Google search for "out of place" fossils. When you look at results you will find plenty of examples that are either discounted, "explained" away, or outright covered up.

And, you, as most other ardent Darwinian's won't give half a thought to the bigger picture and happily swallow the "explanation" knowing full well it doesn't make sense.

You were offered a chance to present evidence and refused. You lose the argument.

Climate science is very complex so while it is in principle falsifiable in practice it is difficult if not impossible to come up with a relatively simple practical test that would falsify it in a short period of time. In the long run if the temperature/energy content of the Earth's geosystems doesn't continue to increase that would falsify AGW. Here is a blog post on the subject [wordpress.com] that contains a list of 10 things that could falsify AGW. But I expect you will reject it for some reason or another.

No. There are way more of us than you, and we have more Internet than you. You got Americans to watch your glossy, soapy, US-television-imitating Doctor Who remake. Isn't that enough? Now go back to your beans on toast, and stop making unreasonable requests.

I would think the bible of the three largest religions would be the peer reviewed evidence but I'm not entirely sure why it is important. God is a supernatural being, that means he or she or it is beyond the laws of nature and if the stories are true, actually created the laws of nature that we are bound to.

In other words, we have limits that a God or gods do not have. The entire realm of science could have been created in an instance and we are taking forever to uncover and understand it. We do not know an

The "God" question (or the "which God" question), is not subject to falsifiability, and therefore, clearly doesn't belong in a science class. If that question should come up, it should be clearly answered with "gods are not falsifiable, so they don't belong in science class - ask a theologian or philosopher".

Now if by denying a 7 day creation period for the planet in science class, we're implicitly denying the existence of God, and your kids pick up on that, I'm not terribly sympathetic. Science may not speak to whether or not God exists, but it has no responsibility to avoid contradicting any particular mythology with the scientific method.

null hypothesis --> there is no god or he/she/it/they do not interact with the observable universe in any meaningfully detectable way.your hypothesis --> there is a god and he/she/it/they do interact with the observable universe in a repeatable detectable manner.

The null hypothesis is the default in science. Proving something is not due to random chance is how science works. That's why we have confidence limits, these limits may be very small but there is still always the chance that it the null hypot

Millions of people throughout history have believed, totally and completely, in the existence of Zeus as a real, literal God who interfered with the Earth in a direct way. Not as many believe in the Aramaic God, of course, but the truth is not a popularity contest.

Any argument you can use against the existence of Zeus can also be used to argue against the existence of God, except the following:

"I feel a great, personal, tangible connection with God and I know in my he

Um, no. The relentless path of universal entropy doesn't exclude localized reversals of entropy. When you create waste heat while building your lego house, you're creating localized order, but still, entropy is increasing in the universe as a whole.

A post which is signed, but posted as Anonymous Coward, is worth nothing.

This response isn't to the GP, it's to anyone who might read the above and nod along.

There are no "arbitrary system boundaries between the earth and the sun". In truth, between neutrinos and other such space weirdness, there are no truly, perfectly closed systems. But we use the term in every day engineering, physics and chemistry discussions because it is useful. We accept that there are no perfectly spherical frictionless cows, but s

Now the 2nd law of thermodynamics says: "All natural systems (e.g. nature) progresses from a state of order (creations) to a state of chaos (puddle of mud)".

When your assumption is wrong, all of your argument is bullshit, so I'll ignore everything after this because it is a flat out lie.

The 2nd law of thermodynamics actually states that the entropy in an isolated system never decreases.

Keyword being "isolated system". You can absolutely decrease entropy within parts of a system. In fact, life is pretty much a system for reducing entropy locally. But here's the catch: Life requires energy input from the outside. Sunlight for plants, food for animals, to put it s

A "good" lawyer/politician is not looking for the truth, they are trained to debate either side and "win". Their job is to obscure the evidence that supports their opponents view and to do that they must know the subject. In such a system it is up to the jury/voters to judge their arguments, unfortunately they often do not have the ability to research an answer for themselves, nor do they have the training to see through the deliberate distractions and half truths of the debating process.Add to that the tri